I\u2019ve always found it morbidly fascinating there\u2019s a scattering of deceased mountain climbers strewn out along the way up to Mount Everest\u2019s summit. <\/p>\n
Their frozen corpses, shrouded in bright overpriced all-weather gear, politely remind those coming after them that continuing to the peak may not be their wisest decision.<\/p>\n
Granted I\u2019m in no shape to climb Murray Hill, never mind Everest, but this does remind me of the body count of politicians lining the trail who\u2019ve tried to reform New York City\u2019s backward property-tax formula, which charges wealthy homeowners in posh ZIP codes a lower effective rate than those living in middle-class neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
No doubt Mayor Mamdani also noticed none has yet summited that mountain after his deputy mayor committed to taking up the cause.<\/p>\n
Look! There\u2019s Bill de Blasio, frozen alongside his 2021 property-tax commission. <\/p>\n
Watch your step over Eric Adams, whose flashy jacket wasn\u2019t fire enough to get a reform bill through the Legislature. <\/p>\n
And over there, it\u2019s Brad Lander, Justin Brannan and even me, the former Republican leader, hitched in tandem along an awkward bipartisan rope, and yet still couldn\u2019t avoid the deep slide into the crevasse of impotence.<\/p>\n
Welcome to base camp, Zohran Mamdani. Godspeed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bon voyage to him and his sherpa, Dean Fuleihan, long a load-bearer of political baggage and eerily familiar with the fickle weather on Mount Albany, where his knowledge of how those bodies got there will prove useful.<\/p>\n
I genuinely wish them luck, as should all New Yorkers. <\/p>\n
Mamdani Hans Lucas\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
The property-tax formula has buried our city in an inequitable avalanche of injustice, in which wealthy property owners benefit from a regressive system that rewards them for living in trendy neighborhoods with transit access and successful schools and punishes the working class in the outer-borough banlieue, where they pay more for less.<\/p>\n
This system has been passed down like a ghost story by generations of city and state politicians who can\u2019t even recall the how, when or why it came about. <\/p>\n
It simply exists, and I\u2019d make good money betting members of the Legislature and council they couldn\u2019t explain how the rates, formulas and calculations add up to your annual bill.<\/p>\n
Go ahead, ask any one of them. I dare you!<\/p>\n
The Big Apple \u201ccharges wealthy homeowners in posh ZIP codes a lower effective rate than those living in middle-class neighborhoods,\u201d Joe Borelli notes. Reuters<\/p>\n
The ideological problem for our new municipal government is the regressive system they\u2019ve inherited stands in stark contrast to everything Marx, Engels, Bakunin and the rest of the socialist gang have long preached. <\/p>\n
The wealthy benefit from the unfairness of this system, the proletariat gets the shaft, and the workers of the world must cough up.<\/p>\n
And now these lefties are in charge. It is their system.<\/p>\n
Yet in the history of socialist thought, these crises of economic imbalance set the conditions ripe for change.<\/p>\n
There has been no shortage of criticism of Mamdani\u2019s youth and inexperience, and he knows solving one of the city\u2019s most complex Rubik\u2019s Cubes of policy will go a long way in silencing the peanut gallery.<\/p>\n
But the crisis and the mandate to make changes could come with a price. <\/p>\n
The de Blasio Property Tax Reform Commission\u2019s recommendations \u2014 supported by notable Mamdani allies like Lander and Brannan \u2014 had the goal of achieving a net-zero tax hike. <\/p>\n
That means fairly assessed values and higher revenues from properties in wealthier neighborhoods were meant to be offset by lower rates for middle-class house and condo owners.<\/p>\n
This was the goal, but it would require the socialists to actually lower taxes for many New Yorkers. <\/p>\n
That might go over like a lead balloon with the same big-government leftists who hope to add new spending items in the midst of already raising revenues to resolve the existing $6 billion budget shortfall.<\/p>\n
Even Joe Borelli, the author, couldn\u2019t get the system reformed. Paul Martinka<\/p>\n
So the real question for Mamdani and his pledge to reform property taxes is this: Is the goal still to provide genuine relief to the middle-class, or has it morphed into a way to \u201ctax the rich\u201d while still taxing the middle class to pay for socialist programming?<\/p>\n
The wrong answer to that could open every crevasse, trigger the landslides and bring the storm clouds that have swallowed up every politician who tried to reform the system through the Legislature. <\/p>\n
All lawmakers will have their own agenda, specific to their constituency, and this will be the ultimate test of herding cats for a new mayor who himself hasn\u2019t shepherded much legislation through the Albany swamp.<\/p>\n
Still, we need him to succeed. There is a genuine bipartisan understanding that this system is inequitable and unsustainable.<\/p>\n
Besides, does it actually help anyone to have one more failed politico, frozen in his skinny tie, added to the body count? <\/p>\n
This could be the mayor\u2019s first agenda item that nets him a few new supporters.<\/p>\n
Joe Borelli is a managing director at Chartwell Strategy Group and was the Republican leader of the City Council.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve always found it morbidly fascinating there\u2019s a scattering of deceased mountain climbers strewn out along the way…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9894,301,9,24,55,54,56,299,11831,7754,82],"class_list":["post-112908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-bill-de-blasio","tag-city-council","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-opinion","tag-postscript","tag-property-taxes","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}